‘Children with Learning Difficulties – A Guide to Parents’ Extra Lesson workshop with LPF Academy ne

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Established in the UK over 25 years ago, The Extra Lesson is a resourceful assessment and intervention approach to working with children and adolescents with learning and behavioural difficulties. This program is based on the premise that learning difficulties are often due to disruptions in the developmental stages of the first seven years of life, which results in poor spatial orientation, body awareness, sensory processing challenges and co-ordination difficulties.

Extra Lesson Australia together with Shalini Gunesekera will conduct a workshop in Sri Lanka at La Petite Fleur Montessori House of Children, Dehiwala. Gunesekera is a certified teacher for children with learning difficulties and a member of the Asia Pacific Extra Lesson Association. A professional who began her career as a kindergarten teacher at Ladies’ College, Colombo, she trained at Extra Lesson Institute for four years and her accredited work takes a holistic approach, combining movement, speech, rhythm and painting.

This workshop titled ‘Children with Learning Difficulties – A Guide to Parents’ will discuss how the program supports the learning, developmental and functional needs of the child. Formulated as a stand-alone interactive module on understanding child development, the workshop will be conducted by Dr. Mariane Judd, an acclaimed psychologist with a teaching background at Extra Lesson, Australia for over 25 years. Upon completing her PhD, Dr. Judd established the Person, House, Tree Drawing, which is an integral part of the Extra Lesson assessment program. Through extensive research, her thesis has shown that Extra Lesson approaches improve children’s literacy skills.

Commenting on the importance of the workshop, Gunesekera said: “Learning difficulties amongst school children, especially those in the primary grades, is becoming a serious concern. We are honoured to associate with Extra Lesson, Worldwide Group on learning difficulties in primary school children, as well as the identification and management of such problems as a means to address this in a simple and practical sense.”

She added: “Whether you are a parent, a teacher, an occupational therapist or a psychologist facing behavioural challenges in children, this workshop will demonstrate the correlation between learning difficulties and early childhood development and show that flexible movement and physical activity can help develop neural pathways in a child’s brain.”

The Extra Lesson, derives its methods from work that began in the 1970s in UK as a drug-free non-invasive program by Audrey McAllen from the universal developmental perspective of Rudolf Steiner’s education of the child. Audrey was later inspired to develop a series of assessment techniques and then a curriculum of tailor-made individual lessons for the child comprising of movement, speech, drawing and painting exercises along with literacy and numerical skills, handwriting skills, balance and co-ordination for children found to have learning barriers to become more confident. Extra Lesson has since grown to help children and parents worldwide.

The workshop will be conducted on 11 April at 4 p.m. at La Petite Fleur Montessori House of Children, 244 Quarry Road, Dehiwala. Tickets for the workshop are priced at Rs. 1,000.